The number of officers killed in the line of duty jumped 13 percent in 2011 compared with the year before — and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder condemned the increase as “a devastating and unacceptable trend” that he blamed on illegal firearms.

The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty rose to 173 this year, from 153 in 2010, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund announced Wednesday. This year’s figure is 23 percent higher than 122 killed in the line of duty in 2009.

Holder said “too many guns have fallen into the hands of those who are not legally permitted to possess them,” in explaining the increase.

Four words for you, Mr. Attorney-General: Operation Fast and Furious (1). It takes a special kind of brass to stand there po-faced before the press and cluck your tongue about the number of officers killed by illegal weapons, considering agencies under your supervision supplied thousands of firearms (and even grenades?) to Mexican drug cartels, even laundering money for them.

Let’s forget for a moment the over 200 Mexican civilians, soldiers, and federal agents killed by weapons supplied by Operation Fast and Furious (aka “Gunwalker”). After all, no one cares about dead Mexicans, do they?

But let’s talk about cops, law-enforcement officers, since you’re so obviously concerned about their safety. Persons such as Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, gunned down by smugglers in Arizona in late 2010: two weapons found at the scene were linked to Gunwalker, while a possible third “walked” firearm, which may have fired the killing shots, has gone missing.

And that makes this ending to the Politico piece so… special:

For much of the past year, one fatality in particular has weighed heavily on Holder’s mind, that of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose December 2010 murder sparked interest and public investigations into the Justice Department’s botched Fast and Furious gun-walking program.

Yeah, I bet it weighs heavily on his mind — as a reminder of his moral or even criminal guilt and his incompetence.

But, it not just one Border Patrol officer on some lonely stretch of the border, Eric. Guns linked to Operation Fast and Furious have been found at the scenes of at least 11 violent crimes inside the United States. There is evidence for other Gunwalker-style operations in states as far from the border as Indiana.

How many of those weapons have been involved in the cop-killings you decry, Mr. Attorney General? How much of that increase has been fed by your department? And yet you can stand there and feign outrage over “illegal firearms?”

Footnote:
(1) Executive summary: Gunwalker was a joint operation of several American law-enforcement agencies and apparently run out of the US Attorney’s office in Arizona. Legitimate gun-dealers in Arizona were encouraged by these agencies to sell thousands of heavy firearms to “straw buyers,” persons acting as covert agents for Mexican drug cartels. No effort was made to trace or keep track of these weapons, which are only found again when they turn up at crime scenes or during police operations. Unlike an earlier (but very different) operation, the Mexican government was not consulted for this, nor were our agents in Mexico kept informed. As a consequence, people have died on both sides of the border and the DoJ is stonewalling to a degree not seen since Nixon. Yeah, it’s a big steaming mess.

Time for more blustering from the millenarian loons who run Iran. This time, it’s yet another threat to close the Straits of Hormuz if the world imposes more sanctions on Iran. It’s not a threat to laugh off; more than 15,000,000 barrels of oil per day from Gulf nations (not just Iran) pass through them on their way to the West and other destinations. As The Telegraph reminds us, that’s about one-third of all the oil shipped every day. Cutting it off would be disastrous for industrial economies, and this map shows that closing the Straits wouldn’t be that difficult:

(Click the image for a larger version.)

Anyway, Iran is upset that Western nations, lead by the Great Satan (that’s us), are considering sanctions aimed at their oil exports. In reply, they’ve threatened that, to paraphrase, “if our oil doesn’t get out, no one’s does:”

Iran’s navy chief said Wednesday that it would be “very easy” for his country’s forces to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the passage at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which about 15 million barrels of oil pass daily. It was the second such warning by Iran in two days, reflecting Tehran’s concern that the West is about to impose new sanctions that could hit the country’s biggest source of revenue, oil.

“Iran has comprehensive control over the strategic waterway,” Adm. Habibollah Sayyari told state-run Press TV, as the country was in the midst of a 10-day military drill near the strategic waterway.

“The free flow of goods and services through the Strait of Hormuz is vital to regional and global prosperity,” said a spokeswoman for the US Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet. “Anyone who threatens to disrupt freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations; any disruption will not be tolerated.”

That, Dear Readers, is polite Navy-talk for “bring it.”

Now, I’m not minimizing the potential for danger in such a situation; the Navy itself war-gamed such a situation in 2002 and the results were scary. But that was ten years ago, and I’ve no doubt Navy planners have been working on ways to counter Iran’s expected swarming attacks. We’re not as incompetent as we sometimes like to think, and neither is the (latest) enemy as tough as he likes to pretend. (In fact, the mullahs have a history of backing down when confronted by force.)

Freedom of the seas is one of the oldest and most enduring principles of American foreign policy, and, as a commercial republic dependent on foreign trade and free passage for our ships, we’ve several times shown ourselves willing to go to war to prevent a hostile power from threatening that freedom. Indeed, we’ve faced and taken down nations a lot tougher than Iran. Ask Japan about it, sometime.

So, I have a message for the medieval lunatics rulers of Iran:

Go ahead, try to block the Straits. Send out your swarms of suicide boats and loft your planes with their missiles. You’ll certainly disrupt traffic and you may close the Straits for a few days. You may even sink a couple of our ships. Go ahead, high five each other and shout “Allahu akbar” to your hearts’ content. Enjoy it while you can.

Because, I guarantee you this: within a week, the USN will have cleared the Straits and sunk every single ship you have, including Admiral Sayyari’s dinghy. Not only that, but your planes will be shot down, your missile launchers destroyed, and your own naval bases reduced to rubble. The oil will flow again, and you will have nothing to show for it but ruin and humiliation.

PS: This situation also points out why the next president, assuming he’s a Republican and a sensible adult, in both cases unlike our current fourth-greatest president ever, should as one of his first acts unclog the exploration and drilling permitting process the Obama administration has so gummed up. We are sitting on vast resources.

PPS: Yeah, I know. Obama does not exactly have a sterling record of defending American interests abroad. But, in this case, I argue he would have to act or see his reelection chances destroyed.

Look, I have nothing against Linda Sterio, any more than I have anything against a waitress unwittingly employed by an Al Capone speakeasy. I wish her well in obtaining employment. But let’s be clear: the scandal is not that she lost her job at Solyndra, it’s that she ever had a job at Solyndra. And that she, and countless others, were deprived jobs at legitimate businesses because government sucked $500 million out capital markets to endorse and underwrite the “clean-energy” hustles of its favorite check-writing eco-crooks.

The price of newsprint being what it is, I suppose it might be too much to ask the WaPo to run photos of the real victims of this scam, the 100 million or so American taxpayers who were left to pick up the tab. Unlike Ms. Sterio we never got a paycheck out of it, only a $5 invoice. But would it kill the Post’s editors to occasionally re-examine its J-school narratives and acknowledge sometimes failure is not the result of Government Not Doing Enough?

And if you haven’t bookmarked Iowahawk, you should. When he’s being serious, he’s good. When he’s being satirical, he’s good and funny.

Staff at Waterstone’s in Huddersfield used a festive point-of-sale sticker to promote the book as “the perfect present” with an accompanying personal recommendation message by a staff member trumpeting the book as “an essential read for anyone”.

Town-centre stores in Manchester, Liverpool and Cheshire have been displaying front covers of multiple copies of the book, a sales technique designed to attract the attention of shoppers.

The trend was first spotted by Jewish travelling salesman Jonathan Levine, 44, from north Manchester. He has now received an apology from Waterstone’s, after he complained.

Mr Levine said: “I would be most obliged if Waterstone’s would explain what lies behind the apparent zeal on their part to promote this disgusting work. When challenging one of the staff in Manchester’s Deansgate branch, I was told that it was ‘a Christmas bestseller which sold really well’. A dubious justification indeed for selling this hateful work.”

I can imagine it sold well during the holidays, given Britain’s large and growing jihadist population and popularity of the book and its author around the Muslim world, for example in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh. I suppose we should be grateful Waterstone’s didn’t market it for Hanukkah.

What genius thought this was a bright idea, and didn’t any of the store personnel question it?

Well, Christmas is past (1) and it’s time to get back to politics. But easily, gently, because New Year’s is still to come (2).

So what better way to do that than a year-end episode of Bill Whittle’s Afterburner? In this edition, Bill recounts the last three years under President Barack Obama (and two of those under near-total progressive rule) and reminds us that, in 2012, it’s time to get down to work and get rid of the worst president of the last 100 years:

(There may be a commercial at the start. Sorry. The Google Empire just couldn’t resist.)

Footnotes:
(1) I hope all y’all had a great one.
(2) And then the Iowa caucuses. But we won’t think about that, right now. It makes my head hurt.